Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/171

 160 J. DEWET : philosophy of nature ; or, considering it as conditioned by thought, we may thus produce a logic. But both of these proceedings go on in abstraction from its real being, and cannot give the real method of philosophy. In short, the real esse of things is neither their percipi, nor their intelligi alone ; it is their experiri. Logic may give us the science of the intdliyi, the philosophy of nature of the percipi, but only psychology can give us the systematic connected account of the experiri, which is also in its wholeness just the experior self-consciousness itself. We may see how the matter stands by inquiring what would be the effect upon philosophy if self-consciousness were not an experienced fact, i.e., if it were not one actual stage in that realisation of the universe by an individual which is denned as constituting the sphere of psychology. The result would be again, precisely, that no such thing as philosophy, under any theory of its nature whatever, is pos- sible. Philosophy, it cannot be too often repeated, consists simply in viewing things sub specie cctcrnitatis or in ordine ad universum. If man, as matter of fact, does not realise the nature of the eternal and the universal within himself, as the essence of his own being ; if he does not ait one stage of his experience consciously, and in all stages implicitly, lay hold of this universal and eternal, then it is mere matter of words to say that he can give no account of things as they uni- versally and eternally are. To deny, therefore, that self- consciousness is a matter of psychological experience is to deny the possibility of any philosophy. What the denial comes to we have had historically de- monstrated in Kant. He admits perception and conception as matters of experience, but he draws the line at self-con- sciousness. It is worth noticing that his reason for denying it is not psychological at all, but logical. It is not because self-consciousness is not a fact, but because it cannot be a fact according to his logical presuppositions. The results following the denial are worthy of notice as corresponding exactly to what we might be led to expect : first, with the denial of the fact of self-consciousness comes the impossi- bility of solving the problem of philosophy, expressed in the setting up of an unknown thing-in-itself as the ultimate ground and condition of experience ; and, secondly, comes the failure to bring perception and conception into any organic connexion with experience, that is, the failure to really comprehend and explain them, manifested in the limitation of both perception, through the forms of space and time, and thinking, through the categories, to pheno-